OTES

The Fatal1ty board has a very distinctive look due to its eye-catching cooling solution. While the South Bridge is equipped with just a little heat sink, the North Bridge is ventilated by a small fan. It is placed vertically at the side of the heat sink below it, which is a different arrangement from other boards.

Even more impressive than this is Abit's OTES system, which encapsulates the voltage regulators under a huge plastic cover. This allows hot air to be efficiently extracted by two 40 mm fans installed at the backplane. Luckily, both fans are controlled by µGuru and thus work silently. Thanks, Abit!

If you detach the air ducting plastic cover (see below) you can look at the four-phase voltage regulators. Though the fins of the affixed heat sinks are not uniformly aligned in the air stream direction, the cooling effect should be good enough to keep the regulators cool. Abit refers to a maximum temperature of 50°C which would be a great result.

In addition to OTES, Abit offers an additional RAM cooling solution called OTES RAMFlow. This device is almost completely made of plastic and is mounted to the memory using a simple spring mechanism. It ventilates the memory modules with two 40 mm fans.

Altogether, a total of five component fans plus the CPU fans will be rotating in a Fatal1ty system. Even though each of these fans individually will be almost silent, the cumulative noise is quite audible.